Focused ethnography to understand local culture and environment for Vitamin A programs

The structure of this book

Overview: What this book is about

The purpose of this book is to contribute to understanding the
sociocultural and environmental factors that affect vitamin A intake and
responses to vitamin A deficiency. The enterprise described here is based on the
assumption that knowledge about the sociocultural and environmental contexts of
vitamin A is essential for instituting and sustaining food-based prevention of
vitamin A deficiency. It describes how a group of nutritionists and
anthropologists worked together to create a protocol to evaluate the natural
food sources of vitamin A in areas at risk for vitamin A deficiency. A manual
describing the creation of a locally contextual protocol is a companion to this
volume, and is titled Community Assessment of Natural Food Sources of Vitamin
A: Guidelines for an Ethnographic Protocol. The protocol combines nutrition
and anthropological tools, and is called focused ethnographic study (FES). FES
is within the realm of rapid assessment procedures (RAP) of
anthropologically-based methods for relatively rapid evaluation of health
problems and prevention programs. In this case, FES is applied to understand how
culture, environment, and food can prevent vitamin A deficiency.

We wrote this book for development planners in health,
agriculture, education, or other: areas. It is also suitable for scholars and
students of nutrition, public health, agriculture, anthropology and human
cultural ecology to describe and discuss the issues surrounding the use of
natural food sources for the prevention of vitamin A deficiency. Ethnographic
research tools and their testing in a broad range of cultures and environments
in five developing countries are outlined, as are the findings from this work.
Chapters contributed by the investigators in these countries describe the
suitability and generalizability of the research tools, the data generated,
practical applications, and directions for
policy.